Mary Barr, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kentucky State University, will offer a critical review of the Friendly Town program that did little to offer more than a vacation for urban youth.
During the 1960s fair housing activists used a variety of tactics to desegregate Chicago’s white suburbs. When efforts to pass statewide legislation failed in both 1961 and 1963, activists shifted their focus to public education. To pave the way for residential integration, they created race relation projects designed to encourage interpersonal relationships between black and white people. Friendly Town was the most ambitious of the racial education efforts. Inner-city children, ages 6-11, were matched with suburban families who acted as hosts for two weeks every summer. Mary Barr, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kentucky State University, will offer a critical review of the Friendly Town program that did little to offer more than a vacation for urban youth.
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Dr. Barr is assistant professor of sociology at Kentucky State University. She is the author of Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to complete her next book examining residential segregation in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs from 1853 to the present.